There are practically only two causes for prostitution among women— wealth and want. Innate modesty, and her normal feebleness of sexual desire, compared with that of man, may, under ordinary conditions, always be relied on to prevent her entering those paths that "take hold upon hell." Of course life is precious to her; even the insult, contumely and degradation of professional harlotry are preferable, on merely human grounds, to the pangs of starvation ; but ordinarily the danger and temptation are far greater to the woman who "lives high," amid scenes of fashionable luxury and dissipation, exposed on all sides to the luBt-excited solicitations of idle libertines, drugged constantly with wine, and very frequently with aphrodisiacs, to whose refined taste the atmosphere of the public brothel would be intolerably offensive. She it is who usually falls into that pitiable condition of neurotic exhaustion which makes her an "interesting invalid" to her lady friends, the pet of the family doctor, and from which the transition to artificial erotism—the hair-pin or the rubber penis—or to secret prostitution, is both easy and natural. These are the women whom Seneca had in mind when he remarked that they were "more solicitous of their head-tire than their health, spending their time between the comb and the glass, far more desirous of being accounted beautiful than virtuous,"1 and "beggaring their husbands, prostituting themselves, enticing men and damning their own souls, all in a breath,"